National Fried Chicken Day: A look at the untold Black history behind the much-loved dish
July 6 is celebrated as National Fried Chicken Day—a date that sees people across the U.S. (and beyond) indulging in one of the world’s most universally loved comfort foods. But while fried chicken enjoys global popularity, from karaage in Japan to chimaek in South Korea, there’s a side of its story that many people don’t know.
Behind the golden crust and juicy bite lies a history that’s far less appetizing: one tied deeply to slavery, racial stereotypes, and exploitation. So as you dig into your favorite fried chicken today, let’s take a moment to explore how this dish became so closely associated with Black culture in America, and how that relationship has shaped both its perception and its power.
Fried chicken’s roots: African hands, southern kitchens
Long before it was bucketed and branded, fried chicken emerged at the crossroads of African and European food traditions in the American South. Scottish immigrants arrived in the 1700s with a habit of battering and deep-frying meat. At the same time, nearly half a million West Africans were brought to America as slaves, many with their own practices of frying, braising, and seasoning poultry.
Enslaved African-Americans were often forced to cook for plantation households and, over time, refined and elevated the fried chicken recipe. While white landowners generally favored beef and pork, chickens, considered cheap and inferior, were left to roam yards and garbage heaps. That neglect gave the enslaved some control. Since chickens weren’t banned in slave codes (unlike pigs, horses, or cows), many Black families raised them for eggs, meat, and income. Chickens were traded, eaten, or sold, offering a rare thread of autonomy in a brutal system.
The labor of frying chicken was intense: birds had to be caught, killed, scalded, plucked, gutted, singed, and butchered before even reaching the frying pan. In Virginia and Maryland, two distinct frying methods emerged: deep frying in lard, and skillet-frying under a lid, served with gravy. Mary Randolph, a white woman from a slaveholding family, published the first known recipe for Southern fried chicken in her 1824 cookbook The Virginia House-Wife, a recipe almost certainly built on the labor and knowledge of the Black cooks in her home.
How racism distorted the dishAfter emancipation, fried chicken became a lifeline for many Black women in the South. In Gordonsville, Virginia, once dubbed the fried chicken capital of the world—Black women sold chicken through train windows to passengers when dining cars were still a rarity. According to scholar Psyche Williams-Forson in Building Houses Out of Chicken Legs, fried chicken enabled these women to achieve financial independence, buy property, and support their families.
But that empowerment came with backlash. By the late 1800s, a racist myth was brewing: that Black Americans had a strange, almost mystical craving for fried chicken. The New York Times published an 1882 article claiming that “in the breast of every coloured man” lived an “ineradicable yearning for chickens.” Absurd courtroom trials followed, one 1876 case in Virginia brought a mother hen to testify against a Black woman accused of theft. The chicken’s supposed recognition of her chick led to a conviction and 39 lashes.
This image of Black people as obsessive chicken thieves became common in American pop culture. The 1915 film The Birth of a Nation—which glorified the Ku Klux Klan—featured a scene of a Black legislator eating fried chicken with his feet on a desk, meant to symbolize sloth, excess, and incompetence.
Even in recent times, this stereotype lingers. Many Black Americans remain wary of eating fried chicken in public, aware of the racial assumptions still attached.
Who owns the recipe? And who gets left behind
Despite Black cooks being the backbone of Southern fried chicken’s legacy, it was a white man—Harland “Colonel” Sanders—who built a global empire from it. In the 1930s, Sanders began serving fried chicken at his service station in Kentucky. Using a pressure fryer to speed up cooking, he refined a recipe and business model that took off in the 1950s as Kentucky Fried Chicken. Today, there are over 25,000 KFC locations in more than 145 countries.
Attempts by Black entrepreneurs to reclaim fried chicken commercially struggled to compete. That contrast is stark: the people who created and preserved the dish saw it turned into a multibillion-dollar franchise by someone who neither invented it nor carried the cultural burden it represented.
Behind the golden crust and juicy bite lies a history that’s far less appetizing: one tied deeply to slavery, racial stereotypes, and exploitation. So as you dig into your favorite fried chicken today, let’s take a moment to explore how this dish became so closely associated with Black culture in America, and how that relationship has shaped both its perception and its power.
Fried chicken’s roots: African hands, southern kitchens
Long before it was bucketed and branded, fried chicken emerged at the crossroads of African and European food traditions in the American South. Scottish immigrants arrived in the 1700s with a habit of battering and deep-frying meat. At the same time, nearly half a million West Africans were brought to America as slaves, many with their own practices of frying, braising, and seasoning poultry.
Enslaved African-Americans were often forced to cook for plantation households and, over time, refined and elevated the fried chicken recipe. While white landowners generally favored beef and pork, chickens, considered cheap and inferior, were left to roam yards and garbage heaps. That neglect gave the enslaved some control. Since chickens weren’t banned in slave codes (unlike pigs, horses, or cows), many Black families raised them for eggs, meat, and income. Chickens were traded, eaten, or sold, offering a rare thread of autonomy in a brutal system.
The labor of frying chicken was intense: birds had to be caught, killed, scalded, plucked, gutted, singed, and butchered before even reaching the frying pan. In Virginia and Maryland, two distinct frying methods emerged: deep frying in lard, and skillet-frying under a lid, served with gravy. Mary Randolph, a white woman from a slaveholding family, published the first known recipe for Southern fried chicken in her 1824 cookbook The Virginia House-Wife, a recipe almost certainly built on the labor and knowledge of the Black cooks in her home.
How racism distorted the dishAfter emancipation, fried chicken became a lifeline for many Black women in the South. In Gordonsville, Virginia, once dubbed the fried chicken capital of the world—Black women sold chicken through train windows to passengers when dining cars were still a rarity. According to scholar Psyche Williams-Forson in Building Houses Out of Chicken Legs, fried chicken enabled these women to achieve financial independence, buy property, and support their families.
But that empowerment came with backlash. By the late 1800s, a racist myth was brewing: that Black Americans had a strange, almost mystical craving for fried chicken. The New York Times published an 1882 article claiming that “in the breast of every coloured man” lived an “ineradicable yearning for chickens.” Absurd courtroom trials followed, one 1876 case in Virginia brought a mother hen to testify against a Black woman accused of theft. The chicken’s supposed recognition of her chick led to a conviction and 39 lashes.
This image of Black people as obsessive chicken thieves became common in American pop culture. The 1915 film The Birth of a Nation—which glorified the Ku Klux Klan—featured a scene of a Black legislator eating fried chicken with his feet on a desk, meant to symbolize sloth, excess, and incompetence.
Even in recent times, this stereotype lingers. Many Black Americans remain wary of eating fried chicken in public, aware of the racial assumptions still attached.
Who owns the recipe? And who gets left behind
Despite Black cooks being the backbone of Southern fried chicken’s legacy, it was a white man—Harland “Colonel” Sanders—who built a global empire from it. In the 1930s, Sanders began serving fried chicken at his service station in Kentucky. Using a pressure fryer to speed up cooking, he refined a recipe and business model that took off in the 1950s as Kentucky Fried Chicken. Today, there are over 25,000 KFC locations in more than 145 countries.
Attempts by Black entrepreneurs to reclaim fried chicken commercially struggled to compete. That contrast is stark: the people who created and preserved the dish saw it turned into a multibillion-dollar franchise by someone who neither invented it nor carried the cultural burden it represented.
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